Both patients and patient service providers benefit from products that provide features that increase therapeutic effectiveness, provide additional benefits, provide greater patient comfort and/or reduce patient cost. Part of the patient care services provided by patient service providers includes the administering of certain therapies such as percussion therapy while a patient is in bed. As known in the art, percussion therapy can be useful for treating a variety of ailments. For example, percussion therapy can be useful in breaking up fluid in the lungs to help prevent the fluid from settling and/or to aid in removing the fluid from the lungs.
Existing percussion therapy mattresses use air forced through bladders and/or unbalanced mechanical motors to provide percussion therapy. These known methods do not selectively provide percussion therapy to particular area of a patients body. In addition, known methods are incapable of varying frequency of the percussion therapy independent from the intensity of the percussion therapy.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an improved method and apparatus for providing percussion therapy to a patient that overcomes one or more of the aforementioned drawbacks.